A propos de DSM Visite du secteur IV

Texte par Céline Flecheux *

2011

(...) Activer les forces en présence était également l’intention de Benjamin Laurent-Aman. Plus insaisissable que les autres, sa pièce tenait plus de la performance que d’un objet clairement défini. Avec le son et la lumière, il s’est servi du bâtiment en cours de construction comme d’une caisse de résonance et d’une lanterne magique simultanément. De nuit, le public était convié devant la bâtisse à écouter le concert de basses orchestré par Benjamin Laurent-Aman depuis une cabine orange. La tonalité d’ensemble de la performance était grave et solennelle, ce qu’il convient d’adopter lorsqu’on se risque à mettre des tensions en présence. Afin de favoriser la concentration, Benjamin Laurent-Aman a délimité une zone de travail précise, celle du bâtiment, qui lui permit de se mettre à l’échelle du chantier en réduisant son champ d’action et en concentrant les effets sur un lieu. Recréer un chantier dans le chantier, tel était le projet de Laurent-Aman ; toutefois, le public découvrait non un chantier en miniature, mais l’inversion du chantier. Là où l’on pouvait s’attendre à une ambiance de fête, avec des gros amplis et des éclairages soutenus, on avait en réalité une ambiance sonore grave et sourde ; là où tout semblait réuni pour une grande « rave party », le public eut la surprise d’écouter un morceau à la John Cage, sans effet dansant, même si les basses tenaient au corps. L’inversion avait aussi lieu avec le bâtiment : éclairé crûment de l’intérieur, celui-ci révélait qu’il contenait des échafaudages et des poteaux de fer servant à soutenir sa structure ; ainsi, la solidité extérieure était contredite par toutes les armatures internes rendues visibles. Là où le cube faisait surface chez les minimalistes, dégageant splendeur et simplicité, le même volume traité aujourd’hui ne fait plus écran, mais boîte de projection.

Les minimalistes affectionnaient particulièrement le genre de volume choisi par Laurent-Aman pour sa performance ; les parfaites qualités plastiques des parallélépipèdes mettaient en scène l’échelle humaine, mais toujours depuis l’extérieur. La nuit du 25 septembre, Benjamin Laurent-Aman a choisi de montrer l’intérieur du volume minimaliste, avec les poutres de béton, des barres de bois et des flaques d’eau. Il nous invitait à en explorer l’intérieur tout en restant à l’extérieur. Le son nous indiquait que nous avions affaire au centre de gravité du chantier. La prise en compte de l’intérieur du bâtiment aboutissait alors à une autre inversion : les échafaudages apparaissaient dans toute leur beauté plastique, alors qu’on a généralement tendance à les dissimuler sous les écrans publicitaires. L’invitation à considérer cette pièce comme une mise en abîme du chantier reposait également sur un petit tableau mécanique que l’artiste avait aménagé devant les barrières de sécurité, face au public. Au sol, près d’une bouche d’égout, quatre figurines miniatures — trois ours et le lapin des piles Duracel —jouaient du tambour, avec, à leur côté, un enregistreur. Là encore, l’inversion était patente : les miniatures ne manquaient pas de nous regarder les regarder.
Cette performance mettait en valeur la part d’improvisation qui revient à l’art et l’on mesurait à quel point celle-ci se tenait à l’exact opposé de tout ce qui se passait sur un chantier, lieu du programme par excellence. De nuit, pris par ces sons et cette lumière crue, entre grues et pelleteuses, le visiteur pouvait faire l’expérience de l’urgence du présent et du sentiment qui rend équivalents l’échec et la réussite. Il y avait performance car il y avait partage du temps, plus exactement d’un présent qui était rendu à lui-même par l’art. Point de célébration de la mécanique à l’image des avant-gardes ici, mais une présentation en creux d’un temps que nous construirons à partir des poussières en suspens de notre regard.
En somme, la proposition de Benjamin Laurent-Aman s’inscrivait parfaitement dans l’esprit des jardins anglais évoqués plus haut, avec une tension dramatique à la Piranèse, propre à toute méditation sur la ruine. (...)

Publié dans Rubbing Glances # 2 (Les editions du Parc, 2011)

* agrégée et docteur en philosophie, maître de conférences en esthétique à l'université Paris VII.

L’horizon, Des traités de perspective au land art (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011)

As long as you stay with me your are safe

Text by Josh J. Weiner

2011

"A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does a circle in a plane. By tracing the ways we represent such a severance, we can begin ... to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance. The act is itself always remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please."
George Spencer-Brown

What is accomplished by the looping of a situation in space? When a moment of time is both taken in and played back in a shifting environment? When you hold a mirror up to a present situation, like a piece might try to do for the situation of its performance, that situation changes. Not only will it reflect its world from one particular spot, but it also gathers around it all the shadowy things beyond the edges of its frame: the dusty smells of an old building, the reverberations and silences of past and present inhabitants, and the material creaks that echo back from beyond the boundaries we feel ourselves occupying.
Benjamin Laurent Aman's work, "As Long As You Stay With Me You Are Safe," draws a circle around a situation defined by sound, light, installation elements, gallery, surroundings, and asks us to see what happens. And what happens, firstly, is that the circle breaks up: the lights go on and they go off, the field of the gallery space is broken up by pieces of furniture, people come and they go. The point is that the breaking of this circle is a beginning ...

A sonic landscape surrounds these elements with a texture made up of breaks. Clean digital sounds derived from a basic wave generator toggle with and overlay the uncertain hiss and cracks of tape recordings. The analog component recalls a presence that haunts from a distance, while the more abstract, foreboding yet also warm digital sounds stretch their reverberations into the very materials of the place, including the flesh of the audience occupying it. In both cases, the interest lies in looping a sonic event and the event of revisiting it: constant breaks and continuous reconnection. The loops Aman creates point to the multiply latticed trajectories, some human other inhuman, that traverse and together amount to the space of the piece existing at all.
But the interest, for him, is always in everything that moves around the fuzzy edges of the mirror he holds up to the performance situation -- for example, the sound traces of the artist's body moving through space in tape recordings, the movements of the audience visiting it, and the pressures of its physical environment. The work stages our perception of all the complex circulation that happens at the edge of its elements. A concrete event "captured" by analog recording feeds an abstract temporal layering of digital tones, which loops back into being the kind of singular moment that could be captured. We are given a broken event.
Yet the intention of this work is not simply to chop up an environment or disorient the viewers passing through it. A series of objects populate it -- targets with bullet holes, pieces of furniture -- that anchor the audience passing through the exhibition, temporarily holding together sound, visual, and architectural elements. These objects are comforting in that they hold our attention, but also uncanny in that they register a violence and a threat that is just outside of the situation we are experiencing. One feels at home and uncomfortable. You want to grab the arm of the stranger next to you in the dark, and at the same time the performance invites one to withdraw into a space of private fantasy, personal association, and kinesthetic experience of the immediate environment.

If a relational aesthetics taught us that art can be a matter of embodied, human, and social experience just as much as the private experience of aesthetic consumption it was so often taken to be, Aman's work suggests that these two kinds of experience are not incompatible. He invites us into a relational art that embraces the sounds and sights of humans, but also floorboards, the concrete and stone of buildings, the unpredictabilities of a neighborhood, and even the echoes of inorganic matter. Around the broken circle his installation draws for us, we pass both alone and together -- a space that wants to be inhabited but can never be stepped into the same way twice.
This broad relationality to the world and the places we make in it that Aman's work invite us to reflect upon can be alternately dangerous and quite funny. He recalls the situation that inspired the title of this piece:
"I did a collective exhibition in April 2010 in Warsaw, in a very unsecure area of the city, very poor, aggressive, children pissing at the door of the gallery, throwing rocks in the windows, stealing the art pieces, etc. A complete fighting situation. One strange Polish man with a rough face, very strong, red nose, big voice, big hands came everyday to repeat that if we had a problem with someone, whe should call him because he knew everybody and he's very respected. He couldn't stop telling us 'As long as you stay with me you're safe'. This sentence made the situation even scarier for us because it made it even more dangerous than before. It was silly."

Aman's work asks us to enter just this kind of open, potentially threatening situation, textured by complex and occasionally chaotic shifts, and populated by apparitions, like the Polish man in the anecdote, that might uncannily remind us of ourselves. The title's off-voice statement -- part threat, part reassurance, even part silly -- leaves us looking around for who this "me" is that we've been staying with, that's unsettled us, and has been promising to make us safe.

Mirages, shimmering through graphite dust. On Benjamin L. Aman’s recent works

Text by Magnus Schäfer

2010

Benjamin Laurent Aman’s installation Mirage Collector, shown in Warsaw in 2010, includes, among other objects arranged in a stage-like set-up, a long steel bar standing in the corner of the room. A piece of graphite is attached to the top end of the bar, reminiscent of an odd-proportioned pencil. Due to the length of the rod any attempt to make a mark with this utensil would result in an inarticulate scribbling. Quietly, the object hints towards an inescapable loss of control, while the piece of graphite is simultaneously exposed as an isolated object, endowed with a heightened presence. It is echoed by a stone covered in graphite dust and placed on the floor near the base of the metal bar. Next to it, Aman stacked up cardboard boxes to create a low, makeshift plinth for a loose pile of folded pictures, held in place by a huge artificial crystal. The question of display returns in another element of the installation, a pedestal on which a cardboard box is presented, this time not as a support, but itself put on display.

The materials that Aman works with have a matter-of-fact quality, often foregrounding their own ‘poorness’, as the cardboard boxes, for example, or the plasterboard used in Overheating Cabine, 2009. The latter piece, an upright, oblong box, open at the top and lit from the inside with red light, is accompanied by several plastic crows, which could well have been sourced from the same do-it-yourself (DIY) store as the plasterboard and which add a deliberately cheap theatrical quality to the work, much like the crystal in Mirage Collector. This quality is, however, not to be confused with irony; despite the sobriety suggested by their minimalist formal vocabulary, Aman’s works are also about unexpected dramaturgic shifts, about hallucinations, as a title like Mirage Collector suggests. This becomes most apparent in the low frequency rumblings of Aman’s sound works, mostly live performances and recordings released on limited run tapes and CD-Rs. Created with guitar and electronic gear such as effect pedals, oscillators and handheld tape recorders, his pieces are usually based on slow moving drones, that potentially upset the listeners’ perception of time in relation to sound. A case in point would be the two tracks from his 2009 release Roaming Daylight. While the first one, Shifted Variations, weaves a loose net of individual guitar notes saturated to the point where they appear as a slow, non-linear succession of thick acoustic blotches, the ten-minute-long, appropriately titled second track An Hour of Lead, blurs all acoustic contours, so that the listeners’ temporal orientation gradually vanishes in the track’s matte grey textures. A series of modified vinyl records from 2009 and 2010 presents a decidedly more physical take on recorded music. Their surface is sandpapered to erase the grooves and then covered with a layer of graphite. The resulting matte, intense black functions both as a visual metaphor
for the vigorous annihilation of the acoustic information originally stored on the records, and as a strikingly sensual monochrome surface.

All about the mirror

Text by Constantin Dubois

2007

We talk about the ‘zone’ as if we’d talk about the state of forgotten, disused places, but maybe is it also more than that. Maybe is the ‘zone’ an inventory of places in general, the place of a temporal capsule, time spatial sensor, visible score-keeper of flow, ageing, renewal or memory... Maybe is it also necessary to search for the ‘zone’ in new blank places like building sites, constructions, projects. It certainly is what Benjamin Laurent Aman’s installations, works like ‘Amusement Park of Unrest’, ‘Stock’, or ‘Flooding’ at first call to mind. Between sculptures, fixed before being put together, still in state of simple separate materials and severe installations, one uses here or plays with the difficulty to decide, which sometimes springs up between project and abandonment.

Under certain angles the abandoned building site suddenly reveals itself as being strange – scattered collection of materials, of which one cannot say whether it is orderly or disorderly, fixed in a cryptic teleology that cannot be distinguished from a wild entropy any more. Once the building site is deserted what still in it does distinguish both its connotations, between project and disorder ? At the gallery space the strangeness braught by the brackets, beams and trestles is their very strangeness towards the place, of which they are at once the non-existence promise and assertion.

This intervening space between the rejected and the well-preserved, which was surreptitiously revealed on the bare site, is also the double-faced state of the stocks. With ‘Stock’ (Aperto Gallery, 2007), Benjamin Laurent Aman yields ground to the visible entropy, but it is to play better with the gallery location itself, as a privileged location to ‘think’ the Place. No need evoking the building site to bring it to the gallery because it is there already, behind the fragile partition wall, in this place where one keeps and forgets as well. It is the sterilized, polished face of the same entropy as the urban planning abandoned areas visible entropy. It is time infiltrated into the place. Fixed installations of these fragile and unnoticed moments when the construction nearly falls over to its contrary or rather where you perceive their inextricable sameness. In ‘Flooding’, the access-points to the room, which are blocked up, have as much to do with the site caution as with the staring look at oblivion . And, inevitably, by not representing the same piece twice, in being installed specifically in each exhibition place, Benjamin Laurent Aman’s work doesn’t only illustrate these spatial-temporal paradoxes, but, at the same time, also re-shapes the art gallery and our relation to it. All in all, like the site, witness of its destruction through its reconstruction, in some ways it is our own reflected image we have to gaze upon. We look at the empty chair and its melancholic lighting, waiting for some meaning to suddenly appear which will only be found in this tautological relation of an expectation facing an expectation. The fixed fixes.

From up the floors, through the windows, we watch floating modules, drones-miradors and we lean over a wooden vat to find our own curious and bent over face reflected in the stagnant water, the well named ‘SAS (Symetric Airlock)’. The water on the canvas cover, making the site sway between both sides of the mirror is also what sends us back our own image of vain observer, our own glance being lost, in quest of a place and however only able to find the swift passage of time and the victory of entropy.